In Your Face(book)

A friend’s son got married a while back, and because of an unfortunate rift with my friend, I was not invited. I did, however, have the pleasure of looking at the Facebook pictures and seeing how old my friend had become.

Actually, the Facebook pictures satisfied many of my baser wedding needs: I could see what the mother of the groom was wearing. (It was an elegant lace dress. I am tempted to direct you to it, but, you know, discretion.) I could study the new in-laws and try to figure out when they and the groom’s parents would be renting a summer house on the Cape together. (About the time the world ends.) I could see that the groom, with whom I'd managed to continue a fond relationship, was looking very sharp. His diet, which I knew all about from his Facebook page, had turned out very well. He'd lost 15 pounds, he had a smart haircut and he wore a beautifully cut tux. He looked happier and more handsome than I had ever seen him. I could get an idea of what the bride’s family had sprung for the wedding. (A bundle, considering the quality of the flowers entwined in the wedding canopy and the size of what, among my people, is referred to reverently as the Room.)

The only thing the Facebook page did not address was that little pang in my heart, which is par for so many Facebook events: Here’s Our Great Wedding/Barbecue/Trip to the City in Which You Live. Too bad you couldn’t be there. Oh, right, you weren’t asked.

This is one of the problems with what I have started to think of as In Your Facebook. In the old days, there were parties to which you were not invited, trips to the city where you lived when you were not called, and it did not matter because you did not know. And if you did, at least there were no pictures. It was the old rule: if your college roommate who has been living in a rain forest in Brazil comes to town and does not call you, but you are not aware she is in town, does it count as a slight? No, it does not.

Now, however, there are countless opportunities to feel wounded. Few may be as egregious as the one I read about two years ago; the married woman who saw on Facebook the brand-new wedding pictures of her husband – his wedding to somebody else. True, it hadn’t popped up unsolicited on her News Feed; she had gone Googling after becoming suspicious. Even so, one wonders what in God's earth the newlyweds were thinking.

Shouldn’t the husband, as a sensitive fellow, have said something to his new bride along the lines of, “Darling, I don’t think we should post our wedding pictures until I’ve had the opportunity to tell my wife I have been cheating on her, recently married another and need an annulment pronto, so I can avoid a bigamy charge”?

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And what about that problem Facebook has yet to address: in the case of divorce or breakup, who gets custody of the Mutual Friends? Even if the husband and wife decide to amicably Unfriend and spare each other their social updates, a Mutual Friend can be a source of painful news leaks: oh, look, here’s a picture Mutual Friend has posted of a dinner party that includes your ex-husband and his new girlfriend. And damn it, he looks so happy.

Get out the Klonopin and speed-dial the shrink.

Sure, there were always socially acceptable white lies or omissions employed to spare a friend’s feeling. But with Facebook and Instagram, they’re harder to carry off.

That out-of-town friend who was too busy with family problems to come visit you after surgery? There he is, surrounded by his buddies, at a balloon festival an eight-hour drive from his home. That tiny little family gathering a couple mentioned as the reason they couldn’t hang out Memorial Day? What are there -- 80 people in their backyard? And what makes it worse is that some of these events look really cool. What are those on the back lawn, lobster pots? And did they actually have fireworks?

I don’t have a lot of illusions about the alternate social universe that is Facebook. I understand that there are unwritten categories that include Friends Who Want Your Job, Friends Who Would Like to Borrow Your Boyfriend, Friends Who Think Your Work Really Stinks. But at least these categories are invisible. As a very funny friend once said, "Do you really want to know what people say behind your back?" And he is correct. Why would you want to know? If you’re feeling that masochistic, you can always Google yourself. There is brutality, the gurgling cesspool of the uncensored id. I am waiting for the inevitable news report of a plunge from a 30th-floor hotel room, and the iPhone left behind on the ledge with that final, anguished tweet: I can read these Comments no longer.

And meanwhile, to you the living, that wide world of Instagram addicts and Facebook users, do not speak of an intimate family gathering, then post pictures of you and several hundred people dancing oceanside.